The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Cory Doctorow
- Language: English
- Genre: Hard Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
gramps’s secret
I love Burbank City Hall. It’s the perfect marriage of everything I love
about this town: a WPA building celebrating solidarity with beautiful
murals and frescoes, but also a theatrical building, with an art deco facade
that’s got this Disneyland-grade forced perspective thing going on that
makes it seem twice as tall as it really is. Someone really good at set design
had planned the building, and it was impossible to take a bad picture in
front of it, whether it was the mayor at her podium giving a presser, or a
group of protesters holding signs—it always came out looking like you
were starring in some kind of movie.
The first time I’d gone there was in the ninth grade, on a civics evening
field trip when we’d all dressed up in our bar mitzvah and confirmation
suits to sit in the gallery during a council meeting. The meeting had been
boring af, but the building made an impression.
I didn’t go back inside for years, but every time I passed it, I got a little
squirt of civic pride, so the field trip had done its job. Then in junior year I
started hanging out with kids whose parents were in the Democratic
Socialists of America and going out with them to the annual Federal Jobs
review meetings or other high-stakes council sittings, and I gained a new
appreciation for the place, all the old brass and the beautiful wood paneling
in the council chamber. I even liked the ground-floor overflow chamber.
But the first time I went back after Gramps died, it was different. I was
used to seeing people from his Maga Club there, speaking about why they
should get their Jobs Guarantee allocations, and I knew that they’d rat me
out to him afterward. But with Gramps dead, I had this feeling like maybe
they’d ambush me on the way home, squirt me with acid or put a bullet in
my brain.
But I wasn’t gonna let them scare me off. I went with a big group of
friends—thirty of us, all recent grads from Burroughs—and we met up with
a bunch of other groups on those dramatic steps and hung out together on
our side, while the Maga Club stood on their side, glowering at us from
under their red trucker caps, frayed and faded like badges of honor. Like old
battlefield ribbons.
The city held these Jobs Guarantee reviews every year, and every year
the Maga Club organized a huge crowd of old white dudes to show up and
argue that the Federal Jobs Guarantee should fund organizations devoted to
dismantling the Federal Jobs Guarantee (and every other Green New Deal
program). At first it had just been a troll, but now they scooped up a third of
the Jobs Guarantee positions and it was hurting the city’s ability to fund
positions for things we really needed, including (ironically) the home
helpers that cleaned these old dudes’ houses and gave them sponge baths
and trimmed their hedges.
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